The Magicians Explained: Everything You Need to Know Before the Season 4 Premiere

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By Alicia Lutes

It’s funny to think that Season 4 of Syfy’s The Magicians will find our titular heroes decidedly magic-less. But that’s exactly the kind of genre subversion that the Sera Gamble and John McNamara-created series (based on the Lev Grossman novels) excels at. Over the course of its three previous seasons, the show has grown exponentially from its origins (arguably for the better) - by creating a rich, layered, nuanced look at personal issues and societal themes through the story of a group of foul-mouthed, pop culture-savvy millennial twentysomethings, the magic of the show is boundless.

It’s also twisty-turny, and full of insane surprises; few shows approach their storytelling with such playful, insightful, and bonkers aplomb - describing the series as a grown-up Harry Potter or Narnia fails to do justice to its creativity. When it comes to being entertained, thrilled, and forced to think, The Magicians will throw you up against a wall, sing you something sweet, and leave you reeling. It's one of the smartest shows on TV, the Stefon of TV series, the kind of show Beck from Netflix's You would've guilty-pleasure watched when she wasn't making questionable dating choices (the two series both count Sera Gamble as their showrunner, and it shows).

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So we wouldn’t blame you if maybe you don’t remember all that’s gone on at Brakebills, Fillory, and beyond up until this point. Or maybe you haven’t given the inventive fantasy series a chance yet, but want to hop on board now that the hype train is gaining momentum (the show’s first three seasons are now streaming on Netflix) and want the abridged version. Either way, we’ve got you covered. Here’s everything that’s happened to Quentin, Alice, Julia, Penny, Margot, Kady, Josh, Dean Fogg, and Fen so far. Oh and Eliot, too — if he’s not dead, thanks to The Monster now living inside him. (But we’ll get to that.)

Season 1

Our tale begins when Quentin Coldwater and his best friend Julia Wicker learn that magic is real after being invited to take the entrance exam for Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. (It’s Harry Potter: American Grad School!) Quentin gets in, but Julia does not, causing quite a rift between the two. Turns out Quentin got in because he was apparently destined to fight The Beast and save the world, but more on that later. Julia goes off to join a group of hedge witches (self-taught practitioners, rather than schooled) and magical spiritualists in New York City, and Q goes onto become one member in a motley crew of magical friends.

There’s Alice Quinn, an incredibly bright—but emotionally neglected—young Phosphormancy student (which means she can use her magic to bend light) from a family with a high magical pedigree; Eliot Waugh and Margo Hanson, two best friends who rule the roost at the Physical Kids cottage (each magician is designated a major based on their magical skillset and placed in a dorm with those in their discipline); Penny, a psychic traveler with a severe dislike of Quentin; and finally Kady, a street-smart Brakebills student, and Penny’s girlfriend, who gets kicked out of school for stealing.

Julia and Quentin

But the magic goes further. Q and Julia bonded over a Narnia-esque book series called Fillory And Further by a man named Christopher Plover; a story about the Chatwin siblings, who travel to a magical land called Fillory to save it from The Beast. Well, guess what? It’s real! (A discovery made thanks to Penny traveling through time and space to a realm called the Neitherlands — essentially a transit hub city from which you can travel the multiverse — with a place called The Library in it, but more on that later). Turns out The Beast knows Q is supposed to kill him, so the surprisingly moth-ridden Beast sets out to kill him first. So the gang — alongside the head of the school, Dean Fogg — filter through multiple time loops (thanks to Dean Fogg and one of the Chatwin siblings, Mary — surprise, they're all real!) to try and take out The Beast, with some help from Julia and her fellow hedge witches.

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Complicating all of this? The hook-ups, of course. In addition to a sorta love-triangle between Quentin, Julia, and Alice (Q always had a crush on Julia, but he and Alice mutually fall hard for each other), and Penny and Kady, we also get hookups between Alice and Penny, Quentin and Margo and Eliot, as well as Eliot and a guy named Mike who ends up getting possessed by The Beast. It’s all...very messy!

But who’s The Beast? Turns out it was Martin, the youngest Chatwin, who sold his humanity so that he could run away to Fillory forever after being abused by the author of the books (he was their guardian). But it’s not happily ever after when the season comes to a close. Instead, the group is in Fillory trying to kill The Beast, but Julia has ideas of her own: she makes a deal with The Beast so she can get her own revenge on the trickster god named Reynard that raped her (while hanging with those spiritualists) and The Beast gets away. There’s also a god named Ember that we meet — but he’s more important in…

Season 2

Oh, what a time to be a human in Fillory! Why, you ask? Because it doesn’t have any kings or queens at the moment and the only folks who rule in magicland are children of Earth! Cue: Quentin, Eliot, Margo, and Alice all becoming royalty and forcing crazy demons to live in their backs and help them kill The Beast once they find him. But not poor, hand-less Penny (he was mutilated by the Beast in Season 1), who’s now on a quest to find working replacements after being cursed by a Fillorian river god (he just can't catch a break). The only way to do so? Promise a life of servitude to The Library. He agrees and shoots off running errands for them for most of the season.

Penny needs a hand. (Sorry.)

Back in New York City, The Beast and Julia are figuring out a way to work together so she can take down Reynard. She calls in reinforcements by way of Marina, head of the hedge witches and not exactly Julia’s BFF. While being used as bait to try and trick Reynard, Marina ends up dead — but not before she’s revived for a second to tell Julia (and Kady, now tenuously friends after Julia indirectly killed Kady’s mom, oops?) that the only way to banish Reynard is to find the woman who did it 40 years ago. The Beast, at this point, is long gone, though — back to Fillory to try and siphon off all its magical powers from its main source, the wellspring.

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Only one problem: The aforementioned god, Ember, has taken a mighty poo in the wellspring and all magic is akimbo. Q and Alice — now super-powered thanks to drinking Ember’s semen (yes, really) as a means to kill The Beast/Martin Chatwin — show up and finally do destroy the big bad. Only the act also ends up killing Alice when she turns into a Niffin. (Niffins are powerful beings made of pure magical energy, created when a magician becomes consumed by trying to control a hard spell or one that calls for more magic than a person can muster. The magic burns the physical person away, leaving only an entity of unruly magical force. Coincidentally, it’s also how Alice’s older brother died! Ouch.)

Alice doesn't mess around.

It’s not all death, though—there’s also life! Both Eliot’s wife, Fen (he’s High King so he has to stay and marry a local), and Julia, are pregnant. Julia’s baby is, admittedly, the only demigod, though. Because it’s Reynard’s! And she’s not happy, so she goes to get a magical abortion only... she loses her shade (basically her magical soul — aka Julia becomes very different and kinda villain-y). Thankfully, she and Q have reconciled and head to the underworld, via dragon, to collect Julia’s shade while Kady has Penny hunt for a book on how to kill gods. Only while there, they run into Alice’s shade, and Julia decides that sacrificing her own shade to help de-Niffin-ify Alice is the right way to go. And they do! But Alice is deeply unhappy about it, knowing that she is going to lose all the power that she had as a Niffin.

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Back in Fillory, war is afoot because of the wonky magic! There’s even a Les Miserables musical number! (This show is nuts.) Thankfully Margo saves everyone by bargaining with the Fairy Queen to fix magic. The cost? Oh, just Eliot and Fen’s baby. Naturally, the duo are none too thrilled about that, and Eliot and Margo’s friendship is effectively over and Eliot, trying to bring democracy to Fillory, is kicked out. (It sucks and we hate it.) Thankfully, he and Quentin meet Umber — brother god to Ember! — and the true reality of Fillory is revealed: it was just one of many worlds the brothers created, but now they’re letting it die ‘cuz they’re bored. Q and Eliot convince Umber to come to Fillory but the family reunion doesn’t go so well... and Ember murders his brother dead.

Thankfully — or not, but we’ll get to that — Julia, now reunited with her shade thanks to Reynard’s mom Persephone, goddess of the underworld, knows the spell to kill a god. How, you ask? Well: Penny found the book he was searching for, but in the process caught a fast-acting, magical cancer that was a boobytrap in the Poison Room where the book was kept. So magic is saved, yes? Ha, not quite: Ember and Umber’s parents, pissed at the magicians for what they’ve done, turn off magic. Everywhere. And no one can do or use it... except Julia, sorta? Turns out homegirl’s growing into a bit of a goddess now, but you’ll learn more about that in…

Season 3

Hold onto your butts, gang, because this one’s a journey — literally a quest! — but we’ll try to keep it quick. A magical being known as The Great Cock (get your mind out of the gutter) tells the magicians that the Quest for the Seven Keys is how they’ll be able to turn back on magic. But it’s not going to be so easy, especially with The Fairy Queen shadow-ruling the magical realm. So Eliot takes off on a sentient, magical ship called the The Muntjac to find a bunch of keys—as do Q and Julia, who realize something’s amiss out in the real world. Certain magical families have weird reserves of magic, but nobody really knows why (more on that later).

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So throughout the season, keys are discovered and recovered, by various combinations of Quentin, Julia, their weirdo classmate Josh, Eliot, and Margo. Felicia Day even stops playing a dragon expert character named Poppy! (She sleeps with Quentin.) They get five of the seven keys with relative ease (though one key takes Q and Eliot a beautiful and sad, romantic lifetime to find), but keys five and seven are really hard to find. Five requires Josh and Julia traveling to timeline 23 — one of the loops we never saw in Season 1 — and bringing it back after killing a Quentin-Beast. They also bring back Penny 23, a welcome addition after Actual Penny died from magical cancer (but he wasn’t in his body at the time so...it’s...uh, complicated?), which throws a big ol’ wrench into the recently reconciled friendship of Kady and Julia. (Turns out, in his timeline, Penny 23 and Julia were soulmates, which doesn't go down well with Kady!)

As for key number seven? Well that one’s on Margo, who has to bargain with the Fairy Queen to get it. But Margo succeeds, thanks to discovering the fact that the “reserve magic” of rich magicians actually comes from the ground up fairy bones of enslaved fairies. The Fairy Queen also gifts Margo a magical fairy eye (after the aforementioned royal absconded with Margo’s original), so all is sorta well. Until the gang gets together to use the keys, anyway...

Margo can rock an eyepatch like no one's business.

Things don't start so great, thanks to Alice destroying the keys. You see, over the course of the season, our girl decided that magic was bad, so she’s followed everyone else to the castle where they can turn magic back on. But remember how I said Julia was sort of a goddess now? Well, she uses that goddess power to restore the keys and turn on magic... to only be foiled again by the ding-dang Library!

Turns out Dean Fogg and the Library were watching this all go down, and at the exact right moment, pounced on the gang, effectively turning themselves into the controllers of all magic. Sound like magical fascism? Guess what: it is! And even worse? All of our magicians have had their memories wiped, magic revoked, and identities switched—out of concern and protection, according to Dean Fogg.

But there’s a bigger danger than magical overlords creeping on our heroes: in the castle there was an evil force, with the ability to jump bodies! So, when everyone else was being changed into someone else, Eliot was transformed into The Monster. And he’s looking for someone to ominously play with...starting with his buddy Quentin, who now goes by the name Brian.

Eliot... or, the monster.

...And there we have it. You’re all caught up! That wasn’t so bad, now was it? Naturally, we missed quite a lot of minor — but very fun and funny stuff — so if you haven’t seen the series, do yourself a favor and catch up. It's quite a ride.

The Magicians Season 4 premieres Jan. 23 on Syfy, and the show was just renewed for Season 5. Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Netflix.

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